Technical Field
The technical field relates generally to transcription of content and, more particularly, to systems and methods for finding relationships between multiple portions of content.
Discussion
Media content (for example video and audio content) is becoming increasingly prevalent as a medium on the internet. For the hearing impaired, individuals with attention deficits, and non-native speakers of the language in which the video/audio content is recorded, this content presents significant challenges. Legislation and regulations often mandate that at least some of this content be made accessible to this population of consumers. Typically, content providers make available transcripts and captions of this content to assist this population, and to more generally (e.g. even with non-impaired users) increase engagement with the online media. Time-coded transcriptions of the content also make possible advanced capabilities such as the interactive transcript plugins and archive search plugins provided by 3Play Media of Cambridge, Mass.
In a typical use case, a content provider—or a third party—produces “clips” from an original media file. The clips are subsets of the original full length media file, often comprised of multiple sub-segments and often reordered for various purposes. Each contiguous sub-segment of the original media file may be referred to herein as a “clip.” A collection of clips concatenated (in any order) into a new file may be referred to herein as a “clip reel.”
Occasionally, clip reels may include additional footage (e.g. an introductory sequence), or the audio track or video track may be altered slightly (e.g. music added, voiceovers added, time expanded, text overlaid, profane language edited, commercial or product placement added). For example, clip reels may be made from a television show to create sharable video, “teasers,” or other advertising vehicles. Or, clips of a university lecture may be produced to highlight a particular sub-topic discussed by the professor. As with the original (complete) media file, it is important that time-coded transcripts, captions, subtitles, annotations, semantic tagging, advertising, temporal metadata, and any other events that rely on the timeline be produced, as quickly as possible, for any clip reels derived from the original media file.
Presently, manual tools exist for producing clip reels and their associated synchronized transcripts and captions. For example, 3Play Media's “Clip Maker” tool enables users of the 3Play Media system to create clip reels from existing transcribed/captioned media files, using textual searching to identify salient regions, user interaction to select a set of regions, and then automatically extracting the video and audio sections from the original media file to create the clip reel. In this case, Clip Maker enables the user to directly control which sections of the original transcript and captions are extracted for the clip reel, and makes available to the user the time codes in the original media file. The user may then use the 3Play Media Timeshift API to extract the relevant portions of the transcript and or captions that were produced from the original media file, using the time codes from Clip Maker.
However, in a typical use case, the clip reels are produced independently of the original media file. For example, in the film industry, it is common for a teaser or advertising clip reel to be made from the original media file (e.g. a feature length film) in a video editor program such as Final Cut Pro (available from Apple, Inc.). Often this reel is produced by a third party such as an advertising department or firm, and this third party does not have access to the time-coded transcript or captions for the original media file. It would of course be possible for the clip reel to be processed separately by transcription and captioning services. However, this is expensive and time consuming, particularly as video programming providers and distributors already have many such clips and the number of clip reels increases.